Atheist, Adulterer, Sodomite, Thief, Murderer, Lyer, Perjurer, Witch, Conjuror or Brute Beast? Discovering the Ungodly in Shakespeare’s England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The “turn to religion” in early modern scholarship has rewritten critical understandings of the 16th century English Reformation by exposing confessional divides in politics, culture, and literature (Jackson & Marotti, 167–90). Such scholarly interest in religious division, however, has paid less attention to how the “ungodly,” a designation for those allegedly hostile to the foundational tenets of all versions of Christianity, shadowed religious belief from the 1530s onwards in England. This may be because of Lucien influential account that declared the “unthinkability” of atheism in the 16th century. More recent attention to unbelief has challenged his judgment and shown the ungodly to be a persistent, and troubling, presence in early modern England. Frequently, this work adduces its most compelling evidence from the drama of Shakespeare’s infamous contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. This article aims to pursue further the representation of the “ungodly” by thinking about how their absent presence might affect not only arguments about religion but also the arguments that we make about epistemology, language, and what counts as the human in Shakespeare as well as his contemporaries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".